Ramifications of ideology

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

We don’t know how many illegal immigrants are in the United States, only that the proverbial figure of “11 million” exists in amber since the last century, and despite massive influxes each year. So there is no way to ascertain either the size of the pool of illegal immigrants or how many have committed crimes. Rounding up every illegal alien and immediately deporting them is not feasible, but that does not mean that over one million with criminal records could not be returned to their home countries as undesirables.

...Some states report a fourth to a third of their murders are likely committed by illegal aliens. That cohort makes up over 25% of federal prisoners.

...Make Mexico Pay?

Sending Mexico a bill, or charging tariffs on trade, to finish the wall as penance for its cynical manipulation of American magnanimity is childish and unnecessary. Instead, we should look at some $40-50 billion that are sent as remittances home to Central America and Mexico each year, largely by illegal aliens themselves. Such a staggering sum might represent on average a $200-500 a month expense per illegal alien, a disposable sum that at best suggests existential poverty may not necessarily haunt every illegal alien resident, and at worse might remind us that government subsidies are sometimes used to free up income to send out of the country. Imagine if $40-50 billion were instead infused into the U.S. health care and legal systems for the indigent.

All the government would have to do, in the manner that most nations abroad already do, would be to impose a federal surcharge on all remittances by any sender who could not provide a U.S. passport to substantiate the transaction. At a 10% rate, billions could be raised ($4-5 billion a year?), and applied to the completion of the border fence. Within four or five years, the cost ($20 billion?) could be easily met by those whose illegality prompted the wall to be built.

Anchor Babies? ...In a practical sense, anyone who lives in an area with a large population of illegal aliens knows that it is a common tact for pregnant foreign nationals to deliberately plan on giving birth in the U.S., both to ensure citizenship for their children, and to create a proverbial anchor, by which they can either obtain legal residency for themselves or cite familial humanitarian claims later on if deportation suddenly looms. Is that not a means of circumventing and subverting the law by avoiding an application for legal green-card resident status? If “anchor baby” is a pejorative term, what then is the politically correct expression for that real fact?

Euphemisms...Breaking federal law is not a neutral matter of being without documents, but simply deliberately choosing never to obtain them at all. Alien (“not of this locale”) is not a pejorative term, but recognizes that Mexico and the United States are two different legal entities. Oddly, what is an offensive noun is La Raza (“the race”), racial chauvinism at its worse. Raza has a terrible history of modern usage in fascist Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy, and has disappeared from popular accepted usage in both countries. Raza was brought back into contemporary American parlance by racial separatists, particularly in the 1960s. Mrs. Clinton just spoke at the National Council of La Raza, and yet has been vocal about accusing others of polarizing the debate through charged language. That is absurd.

Absurd? ...Elites have branded Trump’s immigration proposals as absurd, especially the inflated rhetoric about a wall, and good and bad people. His idea of mass deportations en masse is unworkable, but not an argument against weeding out criminals and those without work histories in the United States.

Jeb Bush implied that elements of illegal immigration are an act of love. Perhaps that is true for millions of illegal aliens, who work hard and for little pay, and usually do not violate further state and federal laws. I see them every day.

But not all foreign nationals from Mexico and Central America do that.

One would accept Bush’s blanket generalization only if he had the clout or capital to be exempt from the ramifications of his own ideology. When a car zoomed into the barnyard last night and tossed out a brood of puppies (twice now in one month), and when last week a man threw wet garbage from his pickup next to my mailbox (full of Spanish language magazines, diapers, and used baby clothes), and when last month someone stole my pickup (found by police abandoned and damaged in a Fresno alleyway, with Mexican beer, food, and Spanish-language ads inside), and when two weeks ago a non-English speaker came in the driveway looking for trailers of prostitution (caravanas) down the road, I felt that they all had expressed little love for animals, the environment, or young women, or for that matter themselves — or me.

In other words, I sensed no act of love.

Read more here.

The world as it is, or as we would like it to be?

Victor Davis Hanson writes his most brilliant column yet for National Review. I have only excerpted bits of it:

At some critical point, everyone makes choices based on incentives and his own perception of self-interest. Somehow the Obama administration has forgotten that natural law.

The theme of the present administration is that it possesses the wisdom and resources to know better what people should do than they do themselves. From that premise arose most of catastrophes that have befallen this administration.

Did administration explanations about Benghazi and the IRS scandals help reassure the American people that what the president said about Obamacare was likely to be true? Does serial disingenuousness finally ensure remorse and a return to veracity?

Do we operate on the T-ball philosophy that effort and happy talk can substitute for achievement? Does continuously blaming a prior president drive home the message of his culpability, or appear tasteless and reveal a sense of inferiority?

Do the unemployed more eagerly seek employment when they are provided increases in food stamps, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, and assorted housing, legal, and education subsidies, or are they more likely to remain on public assistance, to become more indifferent to full-time employment, and to augment their subsidies with off-the-books cash income?

If Americans receive essentially zero interest on their passbook accounts, are they more or less likely to save? If they do save, are they more or less likely to rush into the stock market seeking any return over 1 percent? And will that desperation make stock offerings more or less accountable? Are zero-interest-earning savers in their 60s more or less likely to stay on their jobs? If the former, will that more or less retard employment of younger others?

Does ignoring provisions in the law — such as the individual mandate or legal requirements for insurance plans in Obamacare, or details of immigration law — persuade Americans in their own lives to follow the letter of the law?

If someone makes profits in business or a profession, can he expect to be praised for his success or targeted as making too much more money than others? And what effect on the general economy does such an attitude portend? Would it be better to succeed without government or to fail in partnership with it? Do we more greatly admire a private fracking company, or Solyndra?

Does announcing serial amnesties and praising the DREAM Act during an election campaign encourage a larger or smaller number of foreign nationals to risk entering the U.S. illegally? And would they do so with more or less conviction that their immigration problems were largely political rather than legal? Is amnesty seen as proof of a nation’s tolerance and thus a reason not to abuse immigration law, or proof of its moral confusion and paralysis, which encourages still more illegal immigration?

Does the employment of therapeutic euphemisms — workplace violence, overseas contingency operations, man-caused disasters — reassure Islamists that the United States is now their friend, and recognizably so by our extreme sensitivity in our choice of language? Or does our new vocabulary suggest to enemies that a country that won’t identify them by name will not punish them?

Did consideration of watering down U.S.-induced sanctions against Iran in order to initiate discussions with Teheran reassure allies that they had been right to follow the United States’ lead and ratchet up the embargo on Iranian oil and commerce? Did it encourage the Iranian government to negotiate in good faith? Will Iran now cease its nuclear program, given that the United States is dropping sanctions, providing incentives, and showing its eagerness for a settlement? Will Israel and Saudi Arabia sigh in relief that Iran is now postponing its program in exchange for the end of sanctions — thereby cooling down tensions in the Middle East?

There is a difference between the way we wish the world would work and the way it unfortunately does. We should know that tragedy from our own often-selfish lives in which we make decisions based on our perceptions of advantage. The problem with ignoring the role of unchanging human nature is that usually someone other than the utopian gets killed, runs out of money, or must live with the chaos brought about by the actions of the better-off, who are permitted by their money, leisure, power, and influence to dream that we are something that we are not.